The history of Latin America has seen much socialist hand-wringing and populist platitudes mouthed with the enthusiasm only genuine ideologues can muster. What it has not seen is real progress. This can be seen in the current situation of Venezuela, where a populist government, closely related to the wildly popular demagogue Hugo Chavez, has failed even to meet its citizen’s most basic demands, such as the ability to stay fed and clothed. This unfortunate history of demagoguery, populist incantations and Marxist wealth redistribution has been a feature of the Latin American governance model for as long as history books have been written.

However, certain Latin American countries have been able to break free of this cycle of governmental instability. Brazil is one such example. The country has been able to create an entire class of highly innovative entrepreneurs and a market environment in which those entrepreneurs have been able to freely operate, creating vast wealth for all and fomenting the creation of real social capital of the kind seen in developed countries.

One example of such an entrepreneur is Jose Auriemo Neto, CEO of real estate development firm, JHSF Participaoes, one of the country’s largest. Auriemo Neto has undertaken such ambitious projects as the construction of Sao Paolo Catarina Executive Airport, the first private airport in the Sao Paulo metro area, featuring an 8000 foot runway, long enough to easily accommodate the intercontinental-range jets of the globetrotting elite. Auriemo Neto has long understood that the ability of world cities like Sao Paulo to attract the global rich is one of the greatest tools of real economic development that a city or state can possibly weild.